天下制覇

Freakiest Reality Marble ever.

Impressions:

Let me preface this by saying that while I like Lupin a lot, I’m not a rabid fan and actually haven’t really seen the majority of it. In particular, I never saw the Lupin vs the Clone movie which I imagine contributed a lot of similar themes and ideas as this one. Still, late night Lupin was fun times when I got tired of problem sets in college, so I have at least a passing fondness for the cast.

I have to say that I wasn’t a huge fan though. Two of my favorite characters in the series are Fujiko and Goemon and they were basically completely absent except for a few relatively unimportant and brief parts. Instead, we got a billion Lupins all running around. One of them got caught shoplifting from a convenience store (of all things) and then the rest of the INFINITE LUPINS converged from around the world to break him out because he’s ruining their gigs seducing women as Lupin impersonators. All of them get caught, except for one pickpocket who has more or less repressed his  Lupin-imitator instincts to become a scruffy bum, yet daydreams about living the life of a Lupin through the entire flick and what sets it apart from most Lupin stuff. The whole thing is kind of a bizarre question of who is Lupin instead of his usual wacky antics. Sometimes it worked, a lot of times it didn’t.

Green Lupin (far more competent and quick to resort to violence) declares that there are too many imitators out there, so he’s going to do something really amazing and prove that he’s the real one. That conversation was all in deadpan English and was absolutely unintentionally hilarious. "Mistake is not an option!" "It’s a threat to steal!" That one’s also a fake, but he draws the real’s interest who meets with him in the disguise of Jigen and basically cockblocks him. Things continue from there with the stolen data on Ice Cube, some revolutionary sciencey -thing- that will do "I don’t even know what."

They tried to do some interesting things stylistically on occasion, but they honestly looked pretty awful. For example, the showdown at the end suddenly went into black and white line drawings instead of the usual animation. They used switches like that quite a few times in fact, and it always looked bad in my opinion. It was like the style shifting in that Zetsubou Sensei episode… only at more or less completely random. Some of them didn’t even make sense… like some kid the Green Lupin saved got beaned with a laptop and had a watercolor flashback to his father strangling him… then was blown up by a missle 90 seconds later. The whole fake Lupin thing would also have been a lot more interesting if the real Lupin’s voice wasn’t so distinctive and the fake’s so… well… different. The moment they open their mouths, you can easily tell the real from the fake.

It was overall pretty well done aside from those stylistic quirks. The main problem I have is that for a Lupin production, there really wasn’t that much of Lupin and what Lupin there was had him as more gritty and idealized than the usual philandering, letchy, witty and comical guy that I know and love. It’s quite different, and I’m not sure it was better, but I at least got what they were going for. So much of the focus was on the Green Lupin and the daydreaming pickpocket proto-Lupin that it just didn’t have the same charm and the whole thing was just needlessly convoluted and really didn’t need to be. Hell, like I said, Fujiko and Goemon were barely on the screen and Jigen was around only slightly more. All three combined had about as much screentime as hobo Lupin. Aside from my disappointments there though, it was a pretty solid story and did stay engaging throughout, so I can’t complain too strenuously. Still, in a 70 minutes featuring about 80 different Lupins, I find myself wishing that there had been more Lupin, if that makes any sense to anybody else.

Caps are pretty sparse in comparison to usual (it was basically a full 70 minute movie), just FYI.